Morphemic structure of contemporary Czech: from linguistic theory to automatic language processing

The morphemic research of the Czech language witnessed its largest boom in the 1960s and 1970s. Since the appearance of Retrográdní morfematický slovník češtiny (1975) by Eleonora Slavíčková and of Komárek's Příspěvky k české morfologii (1978), the interest of researchers in this area of linguistics has been waning. The leitmotifs of all nine chapters of this monograph are an attempt to defend morphemics as a stand-alone discipline, an evaluation of the theoretic and empirical knowledge gathered so far, and the justification of formal computer processing as the only promising approach for the future. The interdisciplinary character of the present work manifests itself in the search for impulses for proposing an algorithmic approach to morphemic analysis and synthesis - which is the culmination of the monograph - e.g. in cognitive sciences and general semiotics. An examination of the main principles of how the mental lexicon works, including the theory of activation of language units, shows that a computational approach to traditional linguistic topics and methods can borrow inspiration not only from theoretical fields. The central term, namely morpheme, which is realized as morph in the language usage, is widely believed to have been introduced by Jan Baudoin de Courtenay in the 1880s. Using the great..